I Confess... I Cornered the Market.

A comic book confession.

I’ve decided to close a chapter of my life, and confess something to you all. This is the story of how I cornered the market on a comic book over 4 years. This led me down a path to be on the board of the company that created the comic book.

For the previous 4 years, I have been cornering the market on the Invincible #1 comic book. If you have ever tried to find this comic book at a comic-con… you can’t… because I own so many!

By “Corner the market” I mean buy a controlling interest in a specific comic book. I’ve told a few of you, but I’m not sure anyone knows how deep this cut goes. So, lets start at the beginning:

My family has collected sports cards and comic books our whole lives. Comic books have been my comfort food through good times and bad. I remember when I was six, we went to a local comic book shop that was winding down, and they were selling 5 cent comic books. My Dad turned to me, my brother and sister and said:

“If you can carry it out, I’ll buy it for you,”

That moment I acquired hundreds of comics and it set me down a path of love for the characters and stories.

I’m 38 now, and still absolutely love reading comic books, but in the last decade have started to collect as well. When investing, as we do in Venture Capital, the key was finding a thesis!!

Some years ago, I was inspired because my brother had started to collect a perfect set of a specific type of card. It’s a niche/nostalgic set, and I don’t want to blow up his spot, but it made me think “What should I collect?”

* The things you need to know in order to read on are -

1. First appearances of characters are like rookie cards (The most sought after cards)

2. Comic books that have been graded by a 3rd party for quality are called “Slabbed books.” The goal is to get a higher “Grade” on the slabbed book.

My favorite comic book series is a comic book called “Invincible,” it’s also now the #1 show on Amazon Prime. I bought one #1 invincible at THE Comic-Con in San Diego in 2018…. and then I had a thought… What if I owned all of the Invincible #1s?

So I did some research. In 2003, Robert Kirkman released Invincible. The first print was a small one: 10,000 copies. However, as a collector, I know that I want graded first editions of the comic book!

There’s a service on the internet called GoCollect. It has the data on all of these collectibles.

This image shows the census data as of writing this post, in the category of 9.0 Slabbed books and above. So as you can see there were roughly 1,650. This means there have been more graded in the last year, because when I started this 4 years ago, there were only 1,300 graded.

So I had a general goal of “Figure out how to buy as many as I could of this comic book.”

So I bought one. Then another. Then another…

The first one I ever bought was at Comic-Con in San Diego (the mecca of comic book enthusiasm). The next one was eBay. Same with the following 10, but there were limited supply on ebay, so I started to call local comic book stores. I then hired a sales person on commission to start dialing for dollars for stores around the country. I eventually called a friend who I knew had some connection to the company — Turns out he was on the board. He connected me to someone who owned 30 of the comics! so that was a jackpot… this continued… for years. I just kept hunting down every lead. I eventually invested in a company called Shortboxed, which was a marketplace that sold slabbed comic books!

Eventually I spoke with my friend, Jon Goldman and asked if I could invest in Skybound, the company that owns the rights to the IP of the comic, they also own the rights to the Walking Dead.

I pursued this interest to the depths of my abilities.

In the last 4 years on this mission, I have:

• Called hundreds of comic book stores in multiple states

• Used Ebay alerts to the best of it’s ability

• Called hundreds of people who might have a lead on some comics

• Connected to Skybound, co-founded by Kirkman who created Invincible (And the Walking Dead)

• Joined the board of Skybound, learned a lot about the business of comics

• And lots more things

This side quest I took as a fun comic book investor has led to startup investments and relationships, and networks I couldn’t have dreamed of.

Which brings me to the completion of my journey. I sought out to corner the market, and I ended up at 143 of the original 1300 in existence. This means I own more than 10% of the quest I was targeting. (Now there are 1600, in existence, I still feel great about owning the percentage I do)

But there are a few reasons I’m stopping:

When you start a quest, you don’t know where it will take you. I started with a curiosity, and ended up on the board of the company. I have met the creator of the comic book, artists and the leadership of the organization. I’ve learned why comic books are important to the world, and made great friends along the way. I may have more knowledge on the business of comic books than almost any single person outside the industry.

So from my perspective I SUCCEEDED!! I took this to its natural end. I want to find a new quest to pursue and in order to do that, I have to mentally close the book on this one.

The things I’ve learned:

• To corner a market, either move fast, or be patient

• When you are cornering anything, the price will inevitably go up

• Side quests have verbal virality

• Your curiosities lead you to tight networks

• Things you are interested in, that are important to you, are interesting to other people

• I started out buying a comic, and now I’m on the board…. curiosities and quests have a way of compounding no matter how trivial they may sound

• The universe has a way of giving you opportunities if you ask for them

• There’s a large opportunity in comic books and early ideation of characters

• Comic books stores and distributors forgot who their customers were - kids, and charge too much for their product now

• Comic books is the lowest cost way to create intellectual property around a character

There are millions more things I can say I’ve learned. It’s been a blast.

Thank you to everyone who helped me. Special thanks to my wife for tolerating my madness. Thank you to my partners (Brayton and Maddie) at Boost VC, who realize I’m an idiot and love me for it. Thanks to my friends, Erik Franks, Baha Hariri and Brandon Goldman for following along and not doubting the quest. Thanks to Jon Goldman for bringing me into the Skybound family. DA for welcoming me with open arms. And thanks especially to the creator Robert Kirkman for inspiring such a ridiculous quest.

Because if you are going to corner the market, you have to be …